Hey kitten belts! It’s raining and I’m listening to old Modest Mouse. There are two candles lit on the corner of my desk. Soup is in my future. It’s a splendid dang day, is what I’m telling you. What if you had a belt made of kittens? Or, what if a kitten belt was like a tool belt, in that it had little pockets that held your many kittens? Oh that would be so good. So good! I hope you find your happy place on this beautiful Friday.

You Should Go or Do or Give

+ SAGE (Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders) is conducting a nationwide strategic planning process and they are looking to hear from 1000 LGBT older adults and allies. Is that you? Then take the survey!

Queer as in F*ck You

+ Wow ok I don’t even know how to intro this piece but Noelle Stevenson has written a very, very extensive explanation for how Boba Fett is a Lesbian, and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me?

Doll Parts

That night that my friends were so worried for me, I was sitting on the subway heading home when I thought, Hm. Yep. This may end with him killing me. It is inexplicable how calmly I had this thought, and how I accepted it as a possible iteration of my chosen adventure. You have fallen into a cave and died. Your boyfriend got really drunk and you went home to him and he choked you to death. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t treat every day of your life like an episode of Raymond.

I don’t think anybody in my life knew the extent of it, and anyway, it would have been hard for them to do anything because I was so convinced that it was just a terrible choice I was choosing to make every day. I was just smart enough to stay where I was and keep anybody from intervening. I became adroit at writing expertly cavalier, hilarious apology emails that a jury would probably look at and think, Well, she certainly seemed fine.

Since their inception, America’s biggest social insurance programs have promoted inequality within marriages by pushing couples to organize their household economies so that one spouse is in the workforce while the other performs unpaid care work in the home.

Social Security, for example, encourages breadwinner-homemaker marriages using both carrots and sticks. Most people understand Social Security to pay out benefits at retirement purely on the basis of what individuals pay into the system during their working lives. But, in fact, Social Security does not pay everyone who contributes the same amount equally. Marital status also determines the size of an individual’s benefit. Social Security’s retirement insurance program offers a married person an extra 50 percent of whatever retirement benefit he or she earns. This “dependent benefit” is intended to support the worker’s spouse. Single people in the workforce pay the same Social Security taxes as married people, but they do not earn this dependent benefit. In other words, single people only earn two-thirds of what married people can earn.

Saw This, Thought of You

Resources for children looking to reunite with an incarcerated parent are few and far between. In my search, the closest I came to something useful was this very general list of things to consider before and after the reunion. At this point, it feels like I’m listening to an egg-timer with no numbers to show me how many seconds, minutes, days I have left. To get some advice, and perhaps to feel less alone, I reached out to other adults with previously incarcerated parents and asked about their experiences reuniting.

To introduce Boba Fett is a Lesbian 2K16 you can say that tumblr user Rave Sashayed (one of the co-creators of the Shoebox Project, for any old school Harry Potter fandom ppl) started the movement on her tumblr! Noelle Stevenson wrote the essay but the idea/movement is Rave Sashayed’s

“I may not know shit, but i have completed AT LEAST one star wars Lego, in full, and Boba Fett is a lesbian. I’m sorry if you feel “triggered” by my correctness on this issue, but I can’t in good conscience let that sorrow stand in the way of my self-righteous Tumblr feminazi social justice truth-telling. Boba Fett is a lesbian. Thank you for your time”

I just read every post of @ sashayed’s lesbian Boba Fett tag. I have never cared about Boba before but I am now 100% invested in lesbian Boba Fett. The whole world is so much cooler. I am less angry about the disproportionate amount of Boba Fett merchandise. The Force be with all of us.

Yes! I saw this pop up in the AM & crossed my fingers it wasn’t *just* going to be a link to the Noelle Stevenson piece as I rushed to work… so credit went to the right place but also for another reason:

Noelle wrote up that long and involved theory that, yes, is very interesting and amusing, and I respect the effort, but she went to ALL that effort and uh
alternatively
Boba Fett is trans? The end. lol

look, cis feminists, ily and you’re important but. some days… y’all just need to stop.

Yeah, I’m with you on this one, I think that’s way cooler and fits more with what we know about Boba Fett and Mandalorians in canon/the EU than Noelle Stevenson’s theory. I like the notion that Boba Fett is a disgruntled Maori trans woman who escapes the sarlacc pit thanks to her armor and sheer gumption better than a shapeshifting whitebread impostor.

I’m always ticked that Netflix doesn’t have a lesbian category, but always lumps lesbian together with gay…and now even more ticked that EVEN IN THEIR BILLIONS OF HIDDEN CATEGORIES still lumps them together. How is this helpful to anyone?? There is nothing wrong with queer men, but my desire to see movies about their lives is very different from my desire to see movies about queer women, and I am hard pressed to think of a person for whom this wouldn’t be true true…except possibly a straight person. Which is clearly the kind of person who created these categories….